(gotta love the little detail in panel 2: Rachel isn’t looking at the burbling twit in front of her, she’s looking at Grace. ooooh, and Dorothy might be too. there’s power centres here, and none of them are anywhere near Mary.)

And I, for one, am loving the format of this particular take-down. I’d been worried, earlier, that she’d be brought low by the old trick of being shown as a hypocrite on sexual issues–a secret lover, or pregnant from a one-night stand, or somesuch. But I should’ve had more faith in Willis–this is Mary being called out for being a hateful bigot, because she’s a hateful bigot, not for an unrelated issue.

“Megat-Er… I mean, Ruth is out of sight, so therefore dead. Therefore, i, Mary, am now your sovereign leader, due to my clear moral superiority to you all. We order you to board up the door that your failed, former leader went through, and obviously died. We also declare that any one of you that suggests that they hear sounds on the other side are traitors to the Church-State, and will be summarily dealt with. Hay, no talking among yourselves! I, We order you to do as We say, or else! Guards! This rabble is not acknowledging Our Divine Right to rule them with an iron fist! Wait, what are you doing with those feathers? And, where did you get that rail? “

I’m kinda looking forward to someone pointing out that seeing Ruth and Billie break the rules and then blackmailing them about it is actually way worse than what they did in the first place (morally speaking)

“Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.”

Yes, actually. There’s precisely two passages in the canonical Gospels where Christ, the Big Man of Love and Redemption, gets so disgusted with what he’s seeing that he drives the offender from his presence. Outside of those two situations, he’s more typically portrayed as either bemusedly advisory or slightly reproachful. It’s “Go, and sin no more,” with the understanding that if you do, he’ll say the same thing again, not, “Go, and sin no more, and if you do, I’m calling back all those folks with their rocks again.”

The two points of full-on JC-rage?

1: Kicking the moneylenders out of the temple.
2: Casting Satan away from him during the temptation in the wilderness.

In ~both~ cases, most of the translations I’ve read have him whip out one word: “hypocrite”. It’s thus clear, from context, that hypocrisy is the worst sin, the one that cannot be forgiven readily, because it makes the act of redemption impossible by its nature.

People joke, but that was just an object lesson. He used it as visual aide to the sermon that follows, about how any Christian who does not bear fruit will shrivel up and die.

There were two purposes of miracles in the Gospels–to demonstrate Jesus’s power, and to illustrate the message in that particular situation. Jesus preaches about helping the poor, then he gives them bread and fishes. He calms the storm, telling his disciples that they don’t need to be afraid. He raises Lazarus to show he has power over death, foreshadowing him raising himself.

And, note, I’m not saying you have to believe or not believe. Just illustrating the story-telling techniques. Whether the Gospels were relating true events or not, they clearly have a story-telling purpose–a message to send.

That is not universally true of all sects of Christianity. Catholicism has the sacrament of Confession, and some others have the concept of adult baptism washing away all prior sin and allowing the postulant to be born again. But there are a number of forms of Christianity that don’t really have any special position on forgiveness for sin, and several that explicitly reject the concept.

….I think we’re not supposed to kill animals unless we’re going to eat them, and puppies aren’t kosher… Wait, does that mean the folks writing the adapted version for nonjews were in favor of puppy-killing? No WONDER we rejected Christianity!

Sec. 1. (a) A person who communicates a threat to another person, with the intent:

(1) that the other person engage in conduct against the other person’s will;

(2) that the other person be placed in fear of retaliation for a prior lawful act; or

(3) of:

(A) causing:

(i) a dwelling, a building, or other structure; or

(ii) a vehicle;

to be evacuated; or

(B) interfering with the occupancy of:

(i) a dwelling, building, or other structure; or

(ii) a vehicle;

commits intimidation, a Class A misdemeanor.

(b) However, the offense is a:

(1) Level 6 felony if:

(A) the threat is to commit a forcible felony;

(B) the person to whom the threat is communicated:

(i) is a law enforcement officer;

(ii) is a witness (or the spouse or child of a witness) in any pending criminal proceeding against the person making the threat;

(iii) is an employee of a school or school corporation;

(iv) is a community policing volunteer;

(v) is an employee of a court;

(vi) is an employee of a probation department;

(vii) is an employee of a community corrections program;

(viii) is an employee of a hospital, church, or religious organization; or

(ix) is a person that owns a building or structure that is open to the public or is an employee of the person;

and, except as provided in item (ii), the threat is communicated to the person because of the occupation, profession, employment status, or ownership status of the person as described in items (i) through (ix) or based on an act taken by the person within the scope of the occupation, profession, employment status, or ownership status of the person;

(C) the person has a prior unrelated conviction for an offense under this section concerning the same victim; or

(D) the threat is communicated using property, including electronic equipment or systems, of a school corporation or other governmental entity; and

(2) Level 5 felony if:

(A) while committing it, the person draws or uses a deadly weapon; or

(B) the person to whom the threat is communicated:

(i) is a judge or bailiff of any court; or

(ii) is a prosecuting attorney or a deputy prosecuting attorney.

(c) “Communicates” includes posting a message electronically, including on a social networking web site (as defined in IC 35-42-4-12(d)).

(d) “Threat” means an expression, by words or action, of an intention to:

(1) unlawfully injure the person threatened or another person, or damage property;

(2) unlawfully subject a person to physical confinement or restraint;

(3) commit a crime;

(4) unlawfully withhold official action, or cause such withholding;

(5) unlawfully withhold testimony or information with respect to another person’s legal claim or defense, except for a reasonable claim for witness fees or expenses;

Yes,. And I quite enjoy them. This is really the only fandom I am part of, and it gives me great pleasure to see the way other members of this community interpret the characters.

Some1: I’ve really been enjoying your doa battles. The first few seemed to be independent battles, were you always planning to make it into an actual story as you have now, or did the idea to do so develop as you wrote the earlier ones? Regardless, I am really enjoying this and am happy you take the time to write these.

Yes but i kinda read them in the wrong order.
Since i dont always have time to scroll to all the comments I stumbled into some random ones in the middle of the tournament.
Im gonna read them in the proper order later on.

They hadn’t found Christ, sure, but tracking down prey that is bleeding wine is really confusing for blood hounds. Not to mention ascending into heavens. And yet howling at the moon is pretty good pointing.

She’s all for forgiveness when its her trespasses that are on display. It’s the coward bully code. No forgiveness until they get caught out and then it’s all, “what, no, it was a joke, why aren’t you showing forgiveness for a harmless little jape”.

Another nice part of the bully code. Tolerance is for the weak, the conniving, the LIE-ber-ulls and the preverts. Until the pastor’s caught raping the Sunday School class again. And then it’s all about tolerance and forgiveness. hurts people.

Just noticed she’s still wearing those wristbands. They GOT to have some signifiance to her.
I don’t mean hiding scares under them (I think this was dispelled a while back ?) but … dunno, given by someone important ?

Yeah, a couple storylines back she was wearing 3/4 sleeves without the wristbands, which I think kills it. I’m kind of glad to have been wrong, really… if I’d been right, I’d kind of feel obligated to feel bad for Mary, and I really prefer to keep my hatred pure and unsullied.

Given Mary’s background, they may be something like the Silver Ring thing that was so fashionable about a decade ago – something issued to teens and young adults by her church as a public declaration of their intent to remain chaste.

She’s about 18, and more than likely didn’t start until she was about 4 or 5.
So it probably started out as an accident, and then she stopped for a while, maybe a couple years. Then it became a monthly thing. To make sure she could control herself onwards. But things started slipping and she started doing it once a week by the time she was 13. And it felt so good for that she just had to do it daily around the peak of 15. She’s probably back to once a week after a bender when she was 16.5, so I’d say.
…
So, my math works out to 1077.

Anyway yeah, that’s the thing about Mary. Waits for the first opportunity, then comes on strong, hits ’em hard and fast- but she’s got no follow-through or ability to adapt. Once things turn even remotely south she panics and the whole thing unravels. Poor little antagonist. Better luck next time. /sad trombone noise

What can I say, I love an underdog. I truly believe Mary can bounce back from this and one day become the supervillain she was always meant to be. Follow your dreams, Mary!!! Those buses of orphans won’t throw THEMSELVES off a cliff!

Mary is a sniper. She’s really good at exploiting the one-on-one to make someone feel completely alone and powerless and to hit them where it hurts with something so blatant it momentarily stuns her prey into silence.

But it’s also why she’s flailing randomly here. In a crowd scenario everyone is noticing her awfulness and she can’t appeal to the apathy of the others, because her victims are seeing how no one else is putting up with the garbage.

“Now I feel silly for laying low in the same spot for forty hours straight with a ghilllie suit and soiling myself rather than moving.”

…..

….. okay, I can’t ACTUALLY make that into a metaphor for this situation, but it’s an absurd enough mental image that I’m just going to put it out there anyway. …. and maybe it will show why I need a Walky grav.

I love how in a few short moves, Carla has completely undone Mary’s plan from top to bottom. And having every piece undone by Mary’s natural Maryness and the qualities that allowed her to thrive and seize control of her momentary power in the first place.

So nice to see the others picking up on Mary’s…problems. As someone who got to room with an Unpleasant Person who everyone else didn’t have much trouble with (until she moved to a different dorm and started in on EVERYONE on her old floor…) it is so VERY nice to see Mary being seen through.

And Carla was a cute kid! I’ll admit that my reaction was “Wait, she looks like a…oh. Right. Forgot about that.”

Interestingly i thought she looked like a becky and then realized it was carla. So my thought technically was that she looked like a girl. I actually forgot shes trans and would have been identified as a boy at one point till i read your comment.

Interesting how Mary has a Them vs Us mentality, as in “If I don’t hate you then you must Think the same way I do. If I do Hate you, then me and these others are going to make your life a living hell, since that is the christian way to do things.”

Mary is in college, do you think she will ever learn? Luckily, at the rate this Webcomic moves, we’d be lucky to see them make it to Summer Vacation, much less Sophomore year.

I wonder if Mary’s going to say something particularly awful in the next strip. Half the time when a character says “no lets pity the enemy” or otherwise tries to walk away, the bad guy taunts them until they enter the “screw that, let’s kill em” phase.

I kinda hope that after being kicked out of the dorms, the only place Mary can find lodging is with Marcie, in the studio apartment. However, they only agree to take her if Mary promises to never talk…ever.

Panel 1: Ok, it’s a minor thing, but I love the little role reversal of a classic scene. Like, in the movies, usually the villain character will harass or kick the girl character while she’s down to let the big man come in and tell them to knock that off, y’hear. And here it’s Dorothy stepping up to protect her man. Small thing, but appreciated.

Also, Mary just can’t help herself but to snipe and try and kneecap everyone around her. And here we see yet again her main strength collapsing in on her. She’s excellent at snooping and Carla used that to get her to pie herself.

And here, we see her excellence at emotional jabs. Just out of nowhere, blatant, bigotries that just stun her target into silence or momentarily compliance. We saw it in Carla’s dead stop after the blatant transphobia, Walky’s joke about the voices in his head after her “it’s your fault” comment, and here with the slut-shaming and “they’ll abandon you when they get what they want” scare-mongering on Dorothy.

It’s a quick cut and it’s brilliant in its vileness, because it puts your target off guard and sets up further exploitations of power in the future. It’s the classic, yup, I just violated the social order to attack you that blatantly, care to see what follows? And when combined with social isolation or an authority that has your back, it can be brutal, because it can create a feeling in the victims that they are all alone and any recourse will only end in more pain for them.

And it’s also playing on things that are old news to each of the targets, things they’ve heard a thousand times as well so it carries those echoes. Carla has been misgendered and harassed a million times, I guarantee you. Dorothy has already had a comic where she talked with Joyce about her fears of letting herself be a sexual woman as she knows that will eventually be used against her in her political aspirations. And Walky immediately links her words to the words he has been saying in his head to beat himself up.

All of these can be effective in bowling over a victim and putting them in a vulnerable state. But here, it just clues in everyone around her even more to the nefarious shit she’s been up to and put her in the vulnerable spot of fearing that her dark plot will be revealed and she may have to pay some form of consequence for her actions.

And I like that little touch of Dorothy being the sexual instigator, the person who entered into the relationship entirely because she wanted sex, and yet still facing these gendered assumptions that her active seeking out of pleasure was just her being “easy” and “not guarding her virtues” from the lustful predations of “some boy”.

I don’t normally have a lot to say. Today’s strip really brought a ton of flavors to dissect about each character and it’s all gonna come to a head. Not only that shouldn’t joyce he arriving back soon? Her response to all this is gonna really bring more to the discussion table. I honestly can’t wait.

I wouldn’t be even slightly surprised if there is a huge racist component to Mary’s words to Dorothy; she believes that ‘they’ just want to despoil virtuous white women or something similar. She’s shown a similar ‘they’re out to spoil our women’ paranoia about lesbian women too.

Where IS Roz right now, anyway? I imagine she avoids her roommate as much as possible, but she’d be an awesome addition to this bubbling brew.

My feelings towards Roz are… ambivalent. On the one hand, she’s a powerful woman and a strong activist, full of fire and passion for some very worthy causes and working to advance them in a state where… well, in a state where they need advancing.

But on the other hand… she’s not exactly able to deal with the opposition in a calm, collected manner. She’s not suited to outreach. She might be able to educate the center but she won’t be able to school the opposition. Her dressing down of Joyce AFTER Joyce realized how awful the church (collectively, if not every last individual) had been to the LGBTQ community is a prime example of that, and Leslie was spot on in condemning her for it. I don’t object to her causes, or even much to her passions, but her TACTICS have some big flaws that need addressing.

The thing is, this doesn’t make her a bad grav for me. Unfortunately. I definitely get enraged over social issues, to the point where I become totally ineffectual, or even countereffectual. Over the years I’ve learned to recognize this. Unfortunately, my best and only solution is to withdraw when I get like that, to take myself out of the situation and stay out until I can approach things rationally. This… means I’m not as active as I should be.

To me, Roz represents a part of myself that I fight against, hard and often, because it gets in the way of my effectiveness. It’s a part of me. Even a part of me that I cannot condemn. But it’s a part of me that gets in my way. I’ll own it, even identify with it, but I am not proud of it and I would like to rid myself of it.

So, I am sorry, Grav Roulette. But despite finding a grav that does represent me in some key ways, I’m afraid your task is not yet done.

Assuming, for simplicity (though undoubtedly the full range could work), that if one were to be presented with a scenario that involves gender. If one were to switch, or shuffle, the genders in said scenario, and the moral view or outcome would be different, would thus scenario be considered sexist?

Short answer, yes, there usually is some paternalistic sexism in that outlook, but there is also a disturbing obsession particularly popular among MRAs that obsesses about the “unfairness” of not being able to punch women without cultural disapproval that makes that “oh, am I allowed to punch her now” kind of jokes rather uncomfortable for their combination of two bad tropes.

Also, it posits that there is a level of “unwomanly” behavior a woman can engage in, in which she would “deserve” punching, which tends to play out very negatively for assertive woman of all types and trans women in particular.

And all that tends to forget that culturally, you’re not supposed to punch anyone. It’s not like people look favorably on the type of hothead assholes who go around trying to pick physical fights with other men or on someone who decides the best way to deal with being angry is to straight up clock the person out of nowhere. So the obsession with specifically focusing on the “not allowed to hit women” paternalism gets extra ooky, because yeah, that’s emphasized in sexist culture, but in reality, you’re not really supposed to be punching anyone regardless of their gender identity, outside of extreme situations like having to defend one’s life.

Well, culturally, especially in young male culture, up through high school and into college, extending in some cases much longer, usually in more working class cultures, you really are supposed to punch people – specifically other guys. It’s machismo. It’s about proving your toughness and masculinity.
Jocks beating up nerds are actually popular, not shunned. The common advice to the victims is to learn to fight back, then they’ll respect you.

I think it’s toxic as hell, but it’s definitely a part of our culture.

That’s all changed a bit since I was in school, I think, but it’s certainly not gone. As adults, it’s rarer, but Walky’s just out of that kind of environment.

And yeah, the “never hit a woman” thing is deeply tied to the worst kinds of machismo. And often really means “never hit a woman, in public”. You can hit a man publicly – that’s defending your honor or a woman’s, where it reflects on yours – or sometimes just establishing your place in the pecking order. You should be able to control your woman without hitting her, so being seen hitting her implies you’re not manly enough to do so. Of course, you might need to slap her around in private to keep up the public front.

For Walky specifically, while he’s talked about punching women, it’s generally been for stuff like this, IIRC. Not specifically “unwomanly” behavior, but more general nastiness. Could be wrong. I don’t specifically remember many cases.

Even here though, I’m not sure that’s his conflict. I’ve always thought his over-masculinity seemed a bit forced – a thing he’s assumed as cover rather than innate. There might be a level of “My knowledge of proper manly behavior suggests I have to punch her, but I don’t really want to” here.

While Walky did start it, I was also speaking in a more generalized way. All things should be equal, but age old gender roles make it hard for that to occur. A nonviolent example could be child custody, there are places that favor the mother, just because she’s a woman, not taking into account the personality/skills of either parent (assuming opposite binary genders at play here).

Ye shall know the tree by its fruit. So many wonderful fruity flavors in this hallway, too. And then there is this durian. Or maybe a strawberry? Strawberries are weird, all fused hypanthium and fruit simultaneously. Each of those little specks on the exterior is an individual fruit, and the rest of the thing is from the base of the flower rather than the ovaries (which defines a fruit.)

… I seem to be lost in a flashback to an edible botany college course.

Panel 4: And there it is. Mary is undone. Carla is now three for three in undoing Mary’s plot. And each time it is her own actions that undoes her. I love how on-the-ball Rachel is and how little fucks for her disingenuous bullshit she has. And how quickly she sees through her to the truth.

Also, I’ve mentioned it before, but Mary is such a perfect encapsulation of the bully. All strikes on weak points, little touches of gaslighting, various power plays and appeals to authority, and that desperate need to control and ruin someone else’s life.

And here, that plaintive cowardice when caught. Cause, if she’s the status quo, the microaggressions, the bullies, then she’s best exploiting a situation where she fears no recriminations. Where she expects society to either back her up or turn a blind eye because her targets are powerless and alone and ignored by people with real authority.

And so they react with genuine shock and anger and confusion and shouts of unfairness and appeals to forgiveness when actually caught and punished for their actions, because they just assumed the unspoken social contract was that they were allowed to do whatever they wanted because their victim was worth less than them.

And Mary is no different. She assumed that because she targeted a trans woman and a queer woman, that no one would care about the damage she did. And that says everything about the school and community environment in which she was raised.

Panel 5: And again, I love how little fucks Rachel has here and how quickly both her and Grace put together the pieces. Also, having seen the “wait until the facts come out” concern trolling that happens with things like sexual assault accusations of popular figures, I love watching that tactic fail so spectacularly. Because, yeah, it should be one of those red flags that make you go, uh huh, why exactly are you so invested in brow-beating people off paying attention to this sort of thing.

Also, somehow I bet that if Mary actually killed a bunch of puppies, there’d be sad bastards doing drive-by posts about how she only killed those puppies because they interrupted her studying.

Can we appreciate for a moment panel one and how INCREDIBLY BLEAK Mary’s perspective of sexual relationships is like? Because wow, it’s not even “two corrupted youths sinning together and going to hell in tandem” it’s “men only want one thing and women don’t want to but they can be convinced into doing it in exchange of fake affection”
like WOW that is messed up…not entirely unexpected but still
I mean, at least Joyce (who was probably brought up with similar ideas about sex) recognized that Dorothy and Walky are more or less equals (even though Joyce thinks Walky doesn’t deserve to be in the same standing as Dorothy)

Yeah, that’s something that’s always stood out to me in the sect I grew up surrounded by. Sex was never a dance of pleasure, something beautiful shared between two or more people. It was always seen as something that inherently corrupted your very soul.

Women were brow-beaten that they needed to “guard their virtue” from the predations of men all out to beg, borrow, or steal “all a woman’s worth” in one swift motion, rendering them a chewed up piece of gum, no longer virginal and ignorant and thus less valuable as a gift to a future husband to be her owner.

And men were exhorted that their love was a corruption that could only poison the people they were to be intimate with and that consensual loving sex outside the bounds of marriage was just a bad a sin as sexual assault. Maybe even worse, because in the latter, you could just claim to being carried away in the moment by the woman’s “temptations”.

And it breeds a sick way of viewing intimacy and sexual relationships that also reinforces toxic gender ideas where a woman is a passive receptacle and a holding container for sex and a man’s job is only to best acquire that sex from her by providing her other things in return. Because it is nigh unthinkable in that worldview to imagine a woman could be interested in sex for actual attraction reasons.

Interestingly enough it can be extra fucked up for ace women growing up in that culture, because all that “women don’t experience sexual attraction” often leaves them completely unaware of their sexual orientation. It’s just, oh, everyone’s saying every girl feels like this, I guess it’s my duty to put out anyways. And it’s okay that it doesn’t feel good, because it doesn’t feel good for any woman. But it’s my duty as a woman to put up with it nonetheless to “be fruitful and multiply”.

I’ve heard some heartbreaking accounts from ace women who escaped that type of life and oof, yeah… all the tears.

That…was me. And I didn’t realize it until I just read your comment. (I didn’t actually learn about asexuality until I was about 30, about 10 years after I escaped that community, so I think I just never made the connection.

That was how it was seen when I was a child. Stuff that brand of conservative tells their daughters (I know because my father said it to me in so many words):

*”Boys only want one thing from you, and they will say anything they think you want to hear to get it it.”
*”Never put out, unless he’s put a ring on your finger. Everything has its price and you need to make sure he pays yours.”
*”A girl is like a piece of chewing gum. Do you want gum after it’s already been chewed? Do you think anyone will want you if you give it up too easy?”
*”A boy will only respect a woman who respects herself. Act like a lady and he’ll treat you like one.”
*”If a boy and girl are alone together and he tries something, she really only has herself to blame: she allowed herself to be alone with him. No wonder he got the wrong impression!”
*”Nobody likes a forward woman.”
*”Don’t be too capable. A man likes to take care of his woman. He needs to feel needed.”
*”Girls these days go prancing around almost naked. No wonder the boys are getting the wrong idea! It isn’t sexual harassment, the girls are sending mixed messages. Let this be a lesson to you girls: dress like a whole and you will be treated accordingly. There is something to be said for modesty!”

I could go on, but a sizeable chunk of North America holds girls and women entirely responsible for anything boys or grown men do to them.

I think the issue here is that if you’ve never met someone on the same level as Mary, with the amount of extremism she has, it’s far harder for things to click that people like that actually exist. It’s easier to just go “they’re too extreme to exist.”

As for me, I use cartoonishly as a serious adjective to describe people like Mary because that’s literally the only superlative that comes to my mind. They’re that divorced from the reality around them.

Well, her inability to handle the existence of other people suggests only child in the suburbs type raising and Willis has hinted that her parents were actually rather pleasant, so I’m gonna guess there was a queen bee ruling the local Church she went to and Mary looked up to that, seeing it was the way to power and respect and so has been trying to replicate that way of being “holy” herself.

It’s an abuse tactic based on getting the person being abused to doubt their perception of reality by presenting a fictional or skewed version of reality and acting like the abuse victim is being crazy for not seeing it as well.

It was named after an old play where an abusive husband messes with the gas light in an apartment in order to convince the wife she’s hallucinating things in order to have her involuntarily committed.

It’s recently been observed and noted as a tool of some forms of bullying and harassment as well, trying to skew what is “normal” behavior that the victim “ought to put up with” or trying to get them to doubt their lived experiences of harassment aren’t really happening or that they’re making up everything. Largely because it’s an evil but effective tactic for isolating a target and making them feel helpless and confused and impotently angry and for bullying them into accepting the fictional realities of their attackers.

So you can imagine Mary with a bit more skill in that particular bit of evil being able to effortlessly dance out of her blackmail. What, blackmail, no, I was just so concerned about Ruth’s health and was trying to help her get sober. I really don’t know anything about threats. Did you interpret my attempt to help you as threats? That’s really rude and fucked up, Ruth.

Just to expand a little on Cerberus’s most excellent explanation of gaslighting, it works because it mimics normal interactions and establishes a sense of normalcy.

It usually takes the form of mischaracterizing someone’s reaction to verbal or physical abuse. Sometimes the manipulation is deliberate, but it is also often unintended. Someone makes a comment that they genuinely meant as flattering or encouraging, but it wasn’t received that way. When that person is hurt, people naturally want to deflect the guilt for hurting that person.

We tend to think of ourselves as being basically good people. When the outcome of our actions conflict with that image of ourselves, we look for rationalizations for why the bad outcome wasn’t our fault. The injury is blamed on a misunderstanding that the injured party is responsible for. “You know I didn’t mean it that way”, “You’re just being sensitive” and “Why are you being so dramatic?” are common refrains.

And it can feel so reasonable in the moment. Other people in the social group don’t want to think of Jamie (I’ve decided their name is Jamie) as a bad person, so they eagerly accept that it was a miscommunication and that Jessie (the injured person’s name is Jessie now) should accept the comment in the spirit is was intended. Jessie doesn’t want the conflict and would certainly want people to be understanding if they committed an innocent faux pas. So Jessie accepts the comment and, with it, the insinuation that they’re being too sensitive. Do that enough times and Jessie will begin to internalize the idea that they’re too sensitive in general and will be less willing to speak up in the future.

It also creates a sense of normalcy in the social group. Jessie becomes “the sensitive one” or “the crazy one”. Over time, people feel comfortable saying absolutely hateful things about Jessie and dismissing their reaction as melodrama. “That’s just Jessie being Jessie. You know how they are.” Jamie has effectively created an environment where it is socially acceptable to abuse Jessie.

Every step along the way can happen without deliberate intent or malice, so people tend to become defensive when they get called out on it. They fall right back on that idea that “I’m a good person so you must be wrong” mentality that started it all. That also makes it a powerful tool for deliberate abuse. If, at long last, Jamie gets called on their shit, they can feign ignorance. “What? I had no idea you felt that way! You know I never meant any harm by any of it…”

Long story short, it’s a terribly insidious form of abuse that gets deep in your head and stays there and it’s really good at hiding.

Yeah, and that part about it sticking with you and normalizing other abuse and even potentially happening by accident are all key as well. It’s taken a long time to realize that some of the things my ex did to me were gaslighting and that that really did damage my ability to seek help in emotional crises and express certain emotions like anger.

And it all seemed to happen by accident simply because she didn’t want to accept responsibility for ways she actually did hurt me or dealt poorly with things like my transness or aceness.

This. Yeah, we’ve seen the fruits of her actions. Roz’s weariness and lack of patience for all things fundie. Carla stewing in anger for a day. Ruth catatonic on her bed wishing she were dead. So many rotted fruit borne by this tree.

I don’t think evangelicals have “come around” to Trump, they just despise Clinton more. I’ve seen a lot of comments on friends’ political posts that people don’t actually like anything about Trump, but voting for Hillary is out of the question and voting for a third party (they figure) is the same as voting for her.

Anecdotally, on the other side, from friend’s political posts and online discussion, I’d think that no one could possibly be voting for Clinton except holding their nose to stop Trump and that Bernie would have been a shoo-in.
OTOH, I’ve looked at actual polling data. And the primary results.
Anecdotal data isn’t data.

Throughout the primaries, Trump actually did pretty well with evangelicals, sometimes beating more religious candidates like Cruz.

I saw an explanation that I think works. Here in America, evangelical is basically the default–at least, in large parts of it. So a lot of people are culturally evangelical.

During the primaries, they showed that Evangelicals who attended church regularly were much less likely to vote for Trump than those who didn’t.

However, I also have another explanation that I think also factors in, especially now that we’re in the General. They know that Trump is horrible and they shouldn’t vote for him. But they really want to. They have internalized that Republicans are the “Christian Party.” Hence why having Trump do that “conversion” played so well. Or that piece going around on social media about the seven things that he did that were good (if you squint right.)

Plus there’s the almighty, not-in-the-Bible concept of abortion. Trump has always said he was against it (though he used to be pro-choice) and is now pro-life. I remember in college being told by a Baptist preacher that this trumped everything. That you could not vote for someone who was pro-choice, as it would be voting on a foundation of death.

So I suspect there are plenty of single-issue voters on that. And Johnson is also pro-choice, so they can’t vote for him.

quite the contrast between mary and joyce in terms of what kind of religious person they are. while Joyce is the “innocent, god loving, taught to be embarrassed by her impure thoughts” kind of christian, mary is the “west borough baptist” style evangelical “force others to be as you are through blackmail or other means” kind of christian. i would even say she is like a watered down cardinal of the spanish inquisition that uses blackmail rather than physical means to get her way.

I think that this is the moment when Mary becomes universally despised and totally socially isolated in the dorm. That’s a tough thing to live with. I’m sure she’ll tell herself that it is her ‘martyrdom’ for being ‘righteous’ but I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the long run, it impacts on her health and academic performance so badly that her parents have to move her to Anderson.

Mary may have a redemption potential moment (although I can’t say if she’ll take it) when Joyce returns. She strikes me as the sort of person who’d try to reach out to Mary, because she’d want to find some good in her, if she can.

Well, that’s kind of her fruits being borne. She set out to become an outcast and be despised by the dorm because she wanted the martyr narrative. She wanted to suffer nobly for Christ in the evil secular University, resisting the dark sin of her impure hallmates.

And even then, as an outcast, she won’t suffer nearly as much as any other person outcast by their gender identity, race, culture, or so on. Because no one is going to go out of their way to harass Mary in the way that she did to Carla and Ruth. They’re just going to leave her alone to stew in her frustration and intentional martyrdom.

Hell, if she likely ever did have a character realization and genuinely apologized to her dorm floor, there’d probably be a fair few who would welcome her with open arms (Joyce and Sierra immediately jump to mind).

I love the contrast between what Mary expected and what she got from Rachel and Grace. Evil wins when good people do nothing… and sometimes to foil that evil it’s enough to just literally say what the evil is doing out loud.

Yup, abusers and bullies rely heavily on the “silence as approval” thing to get away with their bullshit. Calling it out repeatedly, recognizing bad behavior as what it is can be super useful because of that.

Though sadly, in the real world abusers and bullies usually respond with gaslighting the people noticing things:

“How could you accuse me of something so vile without proof? Is it because of your implicit bias against me? Really, I’m the victim in this whole thing if you were to ‘look clearly’. And I’m really angry about these baseless accusations. Really makes you wonder about the collusion and awfulness you are trying to hide with these baseless assumptions and accusations. Maybe sexual impropriety with (my victim). I’d watch my back if I were you. What threat? I didn’t make any threats against you, stop being dramatic. Honestly, I just live my life and you hit me with all these disproven accusations and your irrational hatred of me.”

okay so one, is Rachel or Grace talking in panel four? because the bubble looks like it’s pointing at Rachel, but Grace’s mouth is open.

and two (this may have been mentioned before), but I love how the “evil” character and the “main” character are both suupppppper Christian, but they believe in using it in different ways. Joyce’s world view is constantly expanding and changing, and even though she’s panicking about what she’s learned, she was never exactly close-minded on her views. I mean, maybe, but she asked Joe why he didn’t believe in Jesus as the Christ. She honestly wanted to hear other people’s perspectives (possibly to convert them) but even when she found out that Agatha is Mormon, she was like “Ooh okay cool for you I don’t personally believe that but whatever”. On the other hand, Mary is so narrow minded and sure she is right, even if her very best friend in the entire world turned out to be lesbian, she’d probably cut her out of her life completely.

(though wouldn’t it be ironic if Mary fell in love with a girl? she’d have such a crisis and she’d have to apologize for everything and it’d be so great)

Why would she need to be going on about it all the time if it corresponded with her beliefs? You wouldn’t need to constantly work on upholding a facade if there were actual murals and support pillars and a foundation behind it.

I dunno, I’m not a fan of “she’s not really a Christian because she’s such a jerk” arguments. It smacks of No True Scotsman to me. I’d say she’s less like Paul, more like (the late) Tim LaHaye or Pat Robertson. The kind of person so deeply full of their own self-importance that their religion becomes little more than a pedestal/bludgeon combo.

Meh. That’s quibbling over the definition of Christian. The fallacy only applies if you have an agreed upon definition beforehand, like a Scotsman being someone from Scotland. It’s perfectly consistent to say there are certain characteristics and beliefs someone has to have to be a Christian. Heck, the Bible itself basically does so. There are specific “fruits.” And Mary doesn’t have them.

That said, I think it’s fine to call her a “super-Christian” in this context. But it’s in the sense that she constantly talks about her version of Christianity. She makes it the most important thing. She’s not just some awful person who goes to church on Sundays.

Yup, I feel in many ways that Mary is the anti-Joyce. She’s what happens when you take a Joyce and all that she was carefully taught to think about the world and the sinners at the university and instead of being open-minded and empathetic and fretting about how all these sinners seem so nice and the awfulness against them doesn’t feel right.

Instead of that, you close off instead, assume that the sinners are just trying to drag you out of your faith by pretending to be nice and corrupt you into their sinner lifestyles. She’s the “good Christian girl” Joyce was trained to be, what she’s in trouble from her family and church for no longer being able to maintain. Ever vigilant against the deviances that surround her, judgmental against the plaintive attempts to defend sins and how those sins offend God, and to cloak oneself in martyrdom from the evil “attacks” of the victims living their lives (see Becky’s story about her and Joyce’s families joining the Chik-fil-A buy-in).

She’s what Joyce was supposed to be, willing to use any method to maintain that purity and try and wrest control from the forces of sin. And someone trying to gain the only route to power allowed to women in that community. If she’s not the moral center, the heart of her church, then she’s just another one of the soccer moms mourning their lost youths.

No, I think you peg Mary wrong here. That description fits Carol. Mary is not as much twisted by religion rather than twisting it for her own agenda. Her bigotry feeds her religiosity rather than the other way round.

She definitely is not what “Joyce was supposed to be”: Joyce’s education was intended to make her righteous rather than self-righteous, and that’s why Joyce could carry the same principles and premises taught to her by her parents and other teachers to different conclusions.

Carol is awful rather than malignant. From afar that might not seem like much of a difference.

I think Mary is one of the people who thrive in the culture Joyce and Carol are in. The ones who run the bake sales and sneer at the “sinners”, who take their power where they are allowed to take their power, but use that power like a cudgel.

Carol is the soccer mom. Joyce is the heretic. And Mary is the heart of the church. At least in that particular culture.

I don’t really think she believes so. Mary is not stupid. The church has workable positions for phariseans and she is putting her abilities to best use. Basically, this is the St Paul stance: “Hey you know, I think I can take that religion and really make it work.” Maybe she should take up writing epistles to the floors.

Oh Paul definitely was Christian, much more so than Jesus (who was Jewish). He never met Jesus and crafted the Christian religion as a heathen side route around the laws of Judaism. He was thrown out of Jerusalem by Jerome for his hipster version of Messianism and went abroad where he really took off.

Definitely there is no-one deserving more of the title of “Christian” than Paul was. But that was my point: he took Judaism and Jesus and made the combination work for him by creating a book religion light for heathens.

I would hope anyone making a name for themselves in politics would have been trained to recognize what a tediously unconvincing argument that is, especially anyone with enough self-awareness to recognize they are not automatically a good person just because we’d all like to think we are. Yes.

Yes. I’d like to think only Mary could achieve this level of cognitive dissonance combined with massive amounts of ignorance and also increasingly desperate need for worming herself into a position to truly hurt those she judges to be unworthy of less pain in their life.

Any of you ever read or see something and wonder if you are the only person who understood it a certain way? Im having one of those moments right now. I really hope that its just a lack of caffeine and adequate sleep on my part and not Willis about to do a Willis…

Mary would never murder puppies. They’re just animals doing what God created them for in the first place. They’re incapable of sin. Catholics on the other hand, I can very well imagine might have mysteriously disappeared from her neighborhood.

I don’t. Maybe because over here, less than 50 years ago freedom of speech wasn’t something you had (a period that I fortunately dodged by not being born until 8 years after it was over). Whatever the reason, I get leery of anything that infringes on people’s right to say whatever they want without fear of physical repercussions (by which I mean, you can shun them, not hang out with them, or demand they get out of your house or whatever, but you can’t hit them for it). Freedom of speech is the most important of freedoms, because it’s the one that lets you denounce when your other freedoms are being infringed upon.

Words are powerful weapons. In many ways more dangerous than fists.
People have been bullied into suicide, just by words. Often far more blatantly than Ruth here.

The idea that a bully can tear someone down like that, shatter their self-esteem, but if they get angry and strike back physically, they’re now the villain and the bully is the victim is seriously damaging.
The old saw about sticks and stones is bullshit. We are social animals. Words hurt. They can hurt more than physical violence. They can leave scars that last for decades.
Especially when for whatever reason, you can’t just walk away or make them leave – school, family, even a workplace you can’t easily quit. And one where the authorities don’t see or won’t support you.

OTOH, violence isn’t actually the answer either. Biasing everything in the favor of the strongest and most dangerous doesn’t make the world better.

If someone who doesn’t raise her (works better for a her from what i’ve seen) can make you so angry with words that you start raising your voice, never mind start shouting, they can take you for a bad ride – because obviously you are the attacker, ne ce pas?
Worse when you punch the table.
As I promised myself to never make the first blow, it never went beyond that.
But goddess did she imprint on the rest that I was in the wrong and she a harmless, nice and helpless person. While letting manipulative insinuations fall right and left.
With these kind of people, you need to harness your wrath, be extra calm and really think a lot about how to get them to expose themselves.

That said, the reason for my no first punch rule is that I’m utterly convinced that physical violence should be the last resort and only applied when used already.

If it helps, I’ve found that bullies are easily led to aggression if at least one other person is watching. Bullying is about them showing how much better they are than you to all their friends, which means that if you can dismiss their comment with a verbal jab and a chuckle, they lose their temper really REALLY fast.

I know this because I’m too good at actual aggression to feel comfortable throwing the first blow – before I learnt to ignore shitstains (at about 8th grade), I had a bully getting physical at me once. By which I mean one time, because as soon as it was obvious that I find fair fights to be for suckers and go for the eyes and groin as a baseline, they really really restrained themselves to verbal attacks, and since they had the intelligence of the average Trump voter and I could easily turn the tables on them on that field, that too didn’t last long.

Did it get me called to the principal’s? Yes. Did it get me grounded for a month? Yes. But damn if I didn’t spend all the recesses left in the other two years at that school in peace.

@Slartibeast: Escalation seems to be frowned upon. It was something I learnt FAST. As far as I’m concerned, assuming you don’t escalate the TYPE of fight (e.g., from words to fists to deadly weapons) you have my utter and complete blessing to go hogwild on the starter. Fuck that noise.

Remember: eye for an eye leaves everyone blind. Which is why if they make a move for your eye, you rip out their throat.

@JBento: So, obviously of course, if the bully does manage to provoke you into violence, they’re completely justified in going hogwild on you. You escalated. You’re the bad guy, they’re the victim.

Whereas if they bully someone (verbally) to the point of suicide, well that’s not so bad. At least they weren’t violent.

I don’t think that’s actually what you mean, but it’s the consequence of your stance. It’s easy to say not to get angry, just “dismiss their comment with a verbal jab and a chuckle”. For many, it’s a lot harder to do. If people could reliably just dismiss it like that, we wouldn’t have the suicides and traumas we see.
We are social animals. Words can be weapons. They can be deadly weapons. Do not pretend they can’t.

(limited comment nesting is awful, but not as much as no edit function)

@thejeff: No. I apologise if it came out that way. The bully is, by definition, never in the right. If you escalate, however, neither are you. This is particularly problematic in the repercussions angle, because if you escalate, every authority figure that will handle any forthcoming consequences will, as you’ve pointed out, treat you as in the wrong and the bully will get away scot free. If someone harasses you and you punch them in the face and they go to someone in authority – your teacher, your principal, the cops, whoever – you’re screwed. Do not ever escalate. Escalating screws you, bad.

Until we can find a way to handle bullying legal-wise, and mix it unproblematically with freedom of expression, you have two options that don’t leave you worse than where you began: ignore or goad. I’m not saying it’s easy; I’m certainly not saying it’s RIGHT. I’m saying it’s shitty but until we can get it changed, shitty it will continue to be.

Find support networks where you (not you thejeff specifically; a general “you”) can; if you can’t find them in the real world, try to look one up the internet. If you’re feeling depressed, PLEASE call whatever the number for the suicide hotline in your country is, if it has one. If the bullying is systemic, keep away from social networks – facebook, twitter, etc., are filled with shitty people and will not be adequately moderated. Ask around in this very comments section, which is filled with people that are knowledgeable in these sorts of issues (many of whom, it seems, unfortunately from personal experience) and where Willis is quick to wield the banhammer against shittiness.

I like how Mary’s written. I mean, of course she is awful, but she’s not this childlike villain who KNOWS she’s awful. This is just how she thinks, and she thinks it’s ok and doesn’t get why people around her recoil. Like that statement about Dorothy and Walky’s relationship. Yes, it is awful, but she just says like she’s stating a fact, because for her it is.

Anywho, just like toedad, this is an example of a person who does horrible things but thinks s/he isn’t doing horrible things, but the correct ones.

Ah, thank you. I realise now why I cringed when I read the previous strip.

Coming out with the phrase “moral center” is exactly the sort of phrase I’d come out when I lacked self-awareness and empathy.

The psychological world she inhabits consists of herself and these automaton which she talks at, does not connect with. She is the “still point of the turning world.” She has no self-awareness and no empathy, just a set of hardened rules that she’s subsumed into what might become a dangerous megalomania.

Mary will have a breakdown at some stage, and then she will start to become a whole person.

Because two people are locked in a room together and at least one is suicidal? The RM can unlock the door and make sure neither has SUCEEDED in committing suicide. And probably refer them to whatever mental health services are available.

…How would she know that? That’s one thing. But even if that’s the case, why is the first thing that she does is “let’s call an adult!”? Like, is calling an adult with authority really the first thing that comes to your mind when you’re at a college and you overhear that someone’s very depressed, which might be just a half truth (she can’t know for sure)? Like uh. Really?

Well, if she heard Carla talking to Billie while carrying her down the hall or when Carla told Mary “now she might live”, Rachel might be able to put two and two together. But that’s kind of beside the point because it’s not what’s going on here. What Mary is trying to cover up is that Billie and Ruth have an inappropriate, against-the-rules relationship. Which they do. Which should be reported.

Also, if there’s a huge dramatic ruckus going on in your dorm and the RA is at the center of it and therefore not able to handle it, calling someone else with authority does make perfect sense?

I will admit that calling in an adult with authority does somewhat go against the college tradition, nor does it fit well with “Dumbing” of Age. OTOH, Rachel’s one of the sophomores, right? Maybe it’s a sign of maturity.

Oh, not only that, but Joyce’s mind will be blown when she realizes Billie is into the bully she praised her for standing up to, and her childish idea of shipping her and Walky, as well as real people in general has no place in reality.

Because it’s based entirely on the idea that they are a girl and guy who have been good friends since childhood. Neither seems to be into the other in that way, and Joyce just sees that as more proof that they are meant to be. And she’s not just hoping they’ll get together but saying it will inevitably happen

It doesn’t make it wrong, per se, but it does show a childish view of the world.

It’s a little different when you are shipping fictional characters and only mean “it would be nice if they’d get together.”

I’m confused. Clearly Mary knows that what she’s doing isn’t very “Christian,” but instead of dissolving into a puddle of guilt at knowing God will judge her for this, she’s trying to maintain plausible deniability? How has she been justifying her actions to herself if she knows God has a problem with blackmail?

It’s something I brought up in theology class that most fundamentalists don’t actually read the Bible or they’d realize 90% of both testaments are supposedly people half-assing it. It’s like the ONE THING all parts of the Bible agree on.

Because she’s doing it for God. She’s blackmailing the defiler of the cheerleader in an attempt to make the whole floor a more holy place. This is a world where the “holy” have fought religious wars and tortured heretics. Mary’s nasty on a personal level, but in terms of people doing evil in God’s name, she’s strictly small potatoes.

THISSSSS!!!!! So much this! You have no idea how many christians go, for example, “Lying is horrible, unless you’re doing it for Jesus, then it’s laudable.” For them, the lesser evil is the same as good, as long, of course, they’re the lesser evil.

It’s just how humans are wired. We make excuses for our own imperfections while noticing them all the time in others. We self-justify to avoid the cognitive dissonance. For example, someone who lies to you is a liar, but, when you lie, you have a reason that makes it okay. You don’t (instinctively) think about whether the other person might also have a reason for lying.

There’s a term for this cognitive bias, but I’m having trouble finding it. Point is, though, that Mary is not remotely unusual in this.

The only thing that is unusual is how freaking bad she is at covering herself. You’d think someone who had done this so often would be better at it.